How Long Do Students Retain Knowledge after Taking a General Chemistry Test?

摘要

Teachers often report that students forget chemistry soon after a test is completed. Is this true? Is it equally true for different general chemistry courses? This chapter describes how an experiment was designed to explore this question and the research done to address it. The methodological decisions, results, and interpretation of the results are presented here. The authors describe both the research done to address the question and the decisions made that shaped the research but did not necessarily appear in the final manuscript. The results include the fact that not all students experience a decay in knowledge following a test and when such a decay does occur, it happens within the first 48 hours and remains unchanged for up to 2 weeks. Some possible explanations of why some students experience a decay in knowledge might be due to the fact that they have had fewer opportunities to test their knowledge in between tests or did not have a comprehensive final exam scheduled for their course. In addition they may have been taught using a spiral curriculum but as novices, they may not have have understood the implicit spiral nature of their curricula. Lack of student motivation is another possible explanation.